As Winter Storm Harper looms, check out timely tips from CFAES experts on keeping your backyard chickens warm. (Photo: Getty Images.)
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‘His story is one of perseverance, dedication, and humility’
Read the CFAES press release about Rattan Lal winning the Japan Prize.
CFAES soil scientist Rattan Lal wins Japan Prize
Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science in CFAES’ School of Environment and Natural Resources, was today (Jan. 16) announced as a winner of the 2019 Japan Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors in science and technology.
A Japan Prize Foundation press release said the award is for Lal’s work in proposing and practicing sustainable soil management methods that contribute to “both the stability of food security and environment conservation for climate change mitigation.”
More details to come.
Ice, ice, very nice
Many moons ago, as a wet-behind-the-ears grad student, I spent a winter living and working at CFAES’s Stone Laboratory at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie. The winter was a good one for cold, snow, and ice, the lake freezing over in late December, the ice being broken up once by a storm, but then locking in and staying that way, solid, thick, and getting thicker, right into March. My roommate would drive his van on the lake, hauling his ice fishing gear. Guys from Canada’s Pelee Island would zip to Put-in-Bay by snowmobile, a distance of about 5 miles. Dozens of ice fishing shanties, a semi-permanent village, dotted a part of the lake where I’d seen a lone Lyman boat cruising just two months before, a mildish day in early December, the water black, eerily calm, but still then definitely liquid.
A focus on keeping Lake Erie healthy
Classes and workshops at Stone Laboratory are helping educate the next generation of Lake Erie water quality scientists, says an article in the latest issue of Ohio Sea Grant’s Twine Line newsletter.
Stone Lab, part of CFAES, is located at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie. (Photo: 2018 Introduction to Aquatic Biology course, Stone Lab, Daniel Combs, via Flickr.)
Local response to global warming
The Environmental Professionals Network (EPN) presents its next breakfast program, “Climate Action: Our Local Response to a Global Challenge,” from 7:15-9:30 a.m. Jan. 15 in Ohio State’s Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center, 2201 Fred Taylor Drive, in Columbus. Registration is free for EPN members and Ohio State students, $10 for nonmembers, and includes breakfast. Find out more and register.
EPN is a statewide professional group coordinated by CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. Membership is free and is open to anyone studying or working in an environmental field.
Support Stone Lab at Cleveland boat show
Attend the Progressive Mid-America Boat Show, set for Jan. 17-21 in Cleveland, and you can talk with and learn experts from Ohio Sea Grant. Go on Jan. 21 specifically — designated as Lake Erie Day — and you can do that plus support CFAES’s Stone Laboratory on the lake with the purchase of your ticket.
(Photo: Stone Lab’s M/V BioLab research vessel, Ohio Sea Grant, via Flickr.)
On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer, on bot fly?
Why was Rudolph’s nose so bright? Science might have an answer. Our CFAES Stories website offers you shiny facts about reindeer. (Photo: Getty Images.)
Study: Artificial light harms ecosystem health
Artificial light at night isn’t just a health problem for those of us sitting in bed scrolling through Instagram instead of hitting the sack — it hurts entire outdoor ecosystems.
When the critters that live in and around streams and wetlands are settling into their nighttime routines, streetlights and other sources of illumination filter down through the trees and into their habitat, monkeying with the normal state of affairs, according to new research led by CFAES scientist Mažeika Sullivan.
Which birds in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” are Buckeyes?